Title: The Goodbye Girl
Author: BehrBeMine
Disclaimer: Very much not mine. Any of it.
Summary: Shattered glass and overturned cars drive her to dredge up questions she'd long since left behind.
Pairing: Rory/Dean
Note: ggfic100 prompt #02: Lasts. tamingthemuse prompt #37: Devotee.
Warnings: Darkness, character death
Rating: R (overall)
Beta: Lauren - - thanks.
Author's Note: Fear not, it is not a songfic. I place lyrics at the beginnings of chapters sometimes merely to set the mood. Sometimes musical artists can do this better than I can as I fumble for the right words.
Another Note: Written before all of the final season was revealed. Forgive inconsistencies in canon; it was not my intent to follow the last season precisely. The world of this story does not rely on season seven's unveiling. Oh, and please don't kill me. :)
Chapter One: The Sound of Silence
- -
Some things in this world,
Man, they don't make sense.
And some things you don't need
Until they leave you
Then the things that you miss,
You say:
Baby, baby, baby,
When all your love is gone,
Who will save me
From all I'm up against out in this world?
-- Matchbox 20, 'Bright Lights'
--
"You never shut up, do you?" Rory asked playfully, securing her cell phone more closely to her ear while keeping her free hand steady on the steering wheel of her car.
"I love it when you rhetorical-ise me."
"You love it any time the focus is on you in any way," Rory told her mother through the phone, her voice teasing but her point blunt.
"This is true. But who am I to deny the fabulous person that I am in any way?"
Rory smiled, signaling and then turning into the right lane of the highway. "So, was there a point to this conversation?"
"Is there ever?"
"Ooh, you can hand out the rhetorical as well as receive it."
"I am so proud of myself. Keeping up with the likes of you, Miss College Graduate."
"Oh, speaking of, did you hear about the party Grandma and Grandpa are throwing me-"
"-In honor of the one year anniversary of your college graduation? God, yes. Your grandmother won't stop talking to Larry about it."
"Mom, there will come a day sometime when you stop naming your appliances and call it the answering machine. And, really, you should pick up once in a while when Grandma calls."
Lorelai scoffed. "I remember the days when you agreed with naming everything to make it unique. And besides, you only say these things because it would keep the brunt of her away from you."
"That is exactly..." Rory's voice faltered as she hurriedly pressed on the brakes, slowing the car considerably to keep from crashing into the slow moving trail of vehicles before her.
"Did we have one of those 'my cell phone cut out at an inappropriate moment' things happen, or did you just swallow your tongue mid-sentence?" Lorelai asked from somewhere far away.
"Oh... Traffic is slowing down here. Sorry, I just got distracted, what with the whole trying to keep the pieces of this car intact thing," Rory explained, her attention still detained as the line moved forward ever so slowly. "I think I'm going to have to call you back."
"Okay," Lorelai said easily. "Take care of Betty."
"I'll make sure my car is fine. Bye, Mom."
Rory disconnected the call and tossed her cell phone to the empty seat beside her. She could see an ambulance up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the road. As the line before her budged forward, everyone taking their turn to stare, she saw what remained of a car collision. The two vehicles were pretty totalled, one of them flipped over and headed down the slope of decorative grass separating the two different direction spans of the highway.
Honestly, she tried to pull her eyes away, but something kept them seeking, searching for what had sent her brain a-buzz, the fuzzy, dizzying sensation in her head dulling away her awareness of anything but the crash. She slowed further till the car stopped completely, much to the annoyance of other drivers behind her, who sounded their horns in an alarming way. She was staring down at the ground at a body lying on a small padded mat right outside of the ambulance van. Someone was being given CPR, their hair bloodied and clumped in strange places where jagged edges of broken glass had likely sliced through to the skull.
Rory gasped as her breath caught with the morbidity of staring likely death in the eye. She wiped away sudden tears with frenzied fingers, hurrying to right herself in the driver's seat and forge ahead, away from the accident with its angry car horns speeding her along. Car engine roaring, she sped away from the collision that had drawn stares from her like a Christmas tree caught on fire and lit up with the lick of the flames.
--
The next morning, Rory sat with Lorelai at the kitchen table of her old house, which had become the Lorelai&Luke residence, and she had it tattooed on her brain (thanks to Lorelai and her relentlessness), that it was "for real this time". Coffee was guzzled like gasoline in a Hummer as Rory sat, too troubled with her thoughts to reminisce, as always she used to, about living here. And how amazing it was that she didn't anymore. Her apartment in New York drew many parallels, but without Lorelai, Crap Shack Jr. just didn't compare to the original.
Rory nodded along conversationally to Lorelai's description of how Luke chose orange juice over coffee when there was no tea in the house. "It's like, he abandons the Pizza Hut of morning beverages and stumbles on purpose over to the empty lot of Pizza 73. Orange juice! What have I been married to all these months, I mean, really?"
"Heh," Rory said, her coherence somewhere else, her eyes on the extra large coffee mug in her hands.
"Not liking the analogy?" Lorelai guessed, tilting her head towards Rory's lost expression. "I can do a better one..." The space between herself and her audience was not lost on her. "In fact, with how far away your mind is right now, I could probably invent a time machine, go back, erase what I said, and insert the better analogy in before I even started to speak."
She narrowed her eyes at Rory when still there was no response, nor a lift of the head from the intense staring at the mug. "I'm going to use a real eraser, you know. Your dad stole one for me somewhere around ninth grade to prove something. And he really did, from Mr. Callahan's chalkboard. I know now that he is the one to go to if you want useless stolen crap that has no value to you whatsoever. Until, of course, you invent the 'time machine'. Ooh, I'll put it in air quotes like Dr. Evil... Rory?"
"Hmm?" Rory heard her name, and chose that moment to perk right up, instantly paying attention.
"What's got you looking so 'deer, totally not in headlight range'?"
"Oh, it's nothing. I just... passed a pretty bad crash on the highway yesterday." Rory shrugged her shoulders, trying to will away images of the bloody hair, the overturned car. "I can't find a reason why I was so interested in looking, and why, even after I drove on, it's like I can't look away."
"Didn't anyone ever tell you it's not polite to stare?" Lorelai softened her face and reached out a hand to touch Rory's, which were still entwined around the coffee mug that said, I was with Stupid until he left the coffee here. They shared a secret comfort smile.
Rory exhaled deeply, then forged ahead. "You stare."
"At mirrors."
"A bit too much, though."
Lorelai found a grin that slowly spread across her features. "Oh, but it's fun to play vain!"
"Play?" Rory did her best to imitate the grin. "Don't kid yourself."
Clearing her throat and taking mock offense, Lorelai reached for the newspaper that was neatly folded on the table. "Cue silent treatment: now."
Rory giggled silently and reached for the sections of the paper that Lorelai tossed away. She never said no to a look at what Stars Hollow tagged as "journalism". It did feature a weekly "Kirk's Kreations" column, after all. Tossing the sports section aside, she was confronted with a familiar face, and gasped loudly, startled. "It's Dean!" she declared to the kitchen surrounding her, her eyes not leaving his face, the solemnity portrayed in every black and white line.
"What?" Lorelai asked, looking up and setting down the page of ads.
Rory's voice cracked as she repeated, more resolute this time, "It's Dean..." Her voice became a whine of I don't want this, I want the opposite: "It's Deeeeaaan..."
As a tear fell from the storm brewing in Rory's eyes, Lorelai tried to see what her daughter was talking about, but Rory's grip was steely on the paper, thus it wouldn't budge. Lorelai pressed her lips together, however, as she could see the title at the head of the page as Rory's eyes pored over it, as if trying to memorize it before she could attempt to forget it.
Obituaries.
--
'Head injuries and internal bleeding' kept replaying itself in her mind, like a horror-story slide-show that just repeated the image of morbidity like the loud, consistent beeping of an alarm clock. The late-May spring air sent strands of her hair to tickle her cheeks lightly, the feeling similar to a caress. She met the strands with the palm of her hand, holding them gently to her face. Reveling in the one soft thing that would touch her all day, knowing the stab in her heart would begin its pierce as soon as she rose to a panic.
The soft breeze was a short one, and soon enough all of Rory's strands fell back into casual waves along the top of her shoulders. There were so many things she had been realizing ever since viewing the particular section of the newspaper that hardly ever had reason to be included. She realized now that her hair was cut similar to the length of her first year at Yale, again. She heard his voice in her reminiscent mind:
"Did I ever tell you I like your hair?"
She squinted at the sunshine that peeked through the lush leaves overhead as she sat at the same spot where she had found such sorrow the day that Dean got married. She let herself use that as an excuse to look at nothing but the frayed edge of her jean skirt. She picked at soft grass near her body, leaning slightly on the old tree beside her. Turned out, it was nothing like leaning on a friend. Whatever sweet nothings the leaves gently whispered, they weren't understood by her, not this day.
There were so many things she didn't understand that day. Like why this was affecting her so much when she hadn't spoken to or heard from Dean since their final break-up in the immaculate driveway of her grandparents' home. When he said out loud what she would come to realize as fresh days and new relationships developed in the wake of the hollowness he left within her. That it was time to say goodbye to their time together. That he didn't belong in her life anymore, and maybe never did.
And then there was Logan, who was the bombshell to carry the ache of the memories of Dean out into space. She'd rarely even thought about that time in her life since it had been overcome. She was introduced to the world of rich men's hair products, and glowing short blonde strands to replace the floppy wisps of brown that she held in her grip as she was together with a man for the first time. Logan was everything that Dean had meant to say he would never be.
'So, now you care?' she thought bitterly to herself. 'Now that he's gone, "survived by" his parents, his sister, and no one else.' No wife, for Rory had helped take that away. She'd thought of dropping Dean a postcard, here and there, and saying those things reserved for people you don't understand how to communicate with anymore. Lots of "things here are good" and "hope you're doing well", and not much of anything else. She'd made herself ignore the depth of the connection when it was alive, and now it had been severed by a roughly driven dark green jeep. That's what one of the cars had looked like. Somehow she sensed that Dean's was the overturned faded red truck that met its doom in the ditch separating two areas of highway.
Somehow, she'd never dealt with the reality that there would come a day when there would be nowhere to deliver those unwritten post cards. No chances to ask, when she was lonely, "Do you ever think about me?"
Her mind had been blasted by a violent volcanic eruption, which blew the significance of recent things away, replacing them with memories of being a teenager, a girl lost in love with Dean. It was as if the volcano had paved a tunnel right to the part of her brain that saw things most clearly, like viewing her troubles through a magnifying glass. She was remembering the way that it had been, really been. The love that had been truer than she'd experienced since.
She used to have a boy who became a man in her presence, and grew more attached to her than to his wife. She knew a man who had the most tender way of caressing her naked upper arm while they snuggled together under her sheets that were no longer infused with virginity, but enlivened with passion that couldn't be spoken with words.
She was left, now, with the memory of Dean driving away that last time. Left with the pieces of a past that was now broken and would be tainted with the emptiness in the reality that now one of them was dead. The memories were left alone to her, for her to do what she would with them.
She could ask him no more questions. She would never look at that face again. Instead, his deliciously dark hair wouldn't be full of life, but stuck with gooey dark red blood, like she saw that day on the highway. When she stopped without knowing the reason for her morbid fascination that would so quickly come to be explained, and abhorred.
Where she had left him before, sparkling in her many-sequined blue dress and diamond tiara, watching him leave, his thoughts full of things that she never had the chance to correct. Ideas of their lives being too different; their destinies too far spread.
All that separated them now was the big piece of land between her spot on the large hill and the church building, which was in plain view. She didn't attend his wedding; she couldn't bring herself to attend his funeral, either. Not the traditional way, at least. She knew that the service was going on inside of the building every second that she sat there, on the hill that was so conveniently removed from the immediate situation. She felt like rising to a cloud and perching there, squinting her eyes not only at the sun, but in an effort to see what was going on so far down below. Perhaps amid the masses of cloud, she could forget and surrender her misery, and float around like in a dream.
She bit her lip at the thought of that denial, that childish way of wishing for something other than what was apparent and permanently affixed at the forefront of her brain. She was the devotee to all of the misery she had caused and the goodness she had left behind her to forge ahead into a world that turned into... this.
The church doors opened, and a small hoard of black, drearily-clothed souls migrated from the funeral back to their cars, some license plates from Chicago, others from closer locales. She pressed her lips into a line and felt alone, just like that day when he'd run to a vehicle of his own with a new bride he barely knew. The day when she'd sat in this exact spot, hiding from feelings that came to fester and feel like an ulcer in the pit of her stomach.
She couldn't hide from her feelings today. But she could hide her presence from everyone else, while she searched for a rewind button on her life, and his.
(For God sakes, turn around...)
--
She thought, as the church was long since empty, and the sun was beginning to set, of seeing his grave, one day. She wondered if, as she stood before his gravestone, she'd resort to the 'Patch Addams' poetry reading or the 'Forrest Gump' confusion speech. And talk about heaven or hell, as if anyone really knew what either one was. All she knew of hell was the torment that was funneling in her mind, making her steps heavy and labored, as if it hurt to move. How deeply could the agony set in her bones? How many pain relievers would it take to make her body numb and her mind absent from this place, this space in time?
She didn't feel like counting games. She didn't visit his grave, to see the dates of birth and death, a life sealed, zipped, and filed away. She didn't want to set foot on the freshly dug grave so that it could give death to the fifteen year-old in her own body, and snatch away all she had to hold on to of a past lover who deserved a proper goodbye. She would not say it. She would not contribute to that file. She would not be an active part of his death, knowing the way he had wanted her as more a part of his life.
She left the somber grassy hill, intending never to visit it again.
--
"You're playing 'house' again," Lorelai noted, as if it was an understood term as Rory entered the kitchen, looking for an easy dinner.
"Playing house? I'm in a house," she corrected.
"You know what, I'd have to card you right now if you entered my liquor store, babe," Lorelai continued by way of explanation.
"I usually do get carded."
"Now they're going to think your I.D. is fake."
"Why?" Rory shook her hair about a bit, and nervously pulled upon the dark sleeves of her most depressing yet comfortable shirt.
"That jean skirt is so 2000 for you. Maybe even earlier. I find it hard to believe that was still in your closet."
Rory sighed, dropping into a chair at the table, her voice defeated. "What do you mean?"
Lorelai looked to different parts of the ceiling as she struggled to word her point correctly. "It's like you're regressing. Nineteen again, and stumbling out of your room to tell me that a boy's here to borrow a book."
"Mom..."
"It's like you're trying to live in a time when you had him as a surefire part of your life."
"Are you always this annoyingly insightful?" Rory asked, wanting to rub her eyes but unable to due to the thin coat of mascara on her lashes.
"Freud jumped into my body last night. We switched bodies in our dreams."
"I hate Freud..." Rory muttered, letting her head fall to rest, forehead first, on the kitchen table.
"All teenagers would say that."
Rory's voice was garbled a bit by her position and her words were difficult to understand. "'M not a teenager anymore."
"A day ago I didn't think so, either," Lorelai said pointedly. "There's no use living the past, hun. You're just going to wind up letting your future pass you by. And you'll be trapped behind glass, like a dying fish in a zoo somewhere."
"Why would it die...?"
"Well, a fish isn't that interesting an animal. I kind of wanted to end that analogy as soon as I started it."
Rory's slight chuckle came out like a sigh, before she dropped her arms onto the table and rested her head on their softness. She closed her eyes, and saw the empty black space her first boyfriend had been surrendered to.
"You can scream, if you want," Lorelai offered, when enough time had passed that they almost both fell asleep right then and there. "You can have the whole house." She stood from her chair, her movements uneasy. "But I can't hear it. I just can't," she said, gathering Paul Anka from where he sat comprehending his strange little world on the floor and taking him with her out to the yard.
Plugging her ears at the far end of the front yard, Lorelai waited for a loud sound, a single, long release of terror at the biggest loss yet in Rory's life. She waited for the sound of an eternal flat line to penetrate the stuffed holes in her ears, a generation long curse word bleeped out on public television. She waited for a single scream to pierce the air for so long that it seemed foreign when the silence remained afterward as she found the bravery to stop plugging her ears. She waited, her limbs tense as the silence was all that met her, and now engulfed her daughter completely.
- -
to be continued...